Search form

Search

Sign up

Help protect the places we love, the values we share

Optional Member Code

In our emails, sent once or twice a week, you'll receive:
• alerts on new threats to Oregon's environment
• opportunities to join other Oregonians on urgent actions
• updates on the decisions that impact our environment
• resources to help you create a cleaner, greener future

Environment America Blog

We know too little about the interaction of species and their effects on each other within ecosystems. What we do know is fascinating. For instance, check out this National Geographic video about how wolves changed rivers, as peculiar as that sounds.

We also know that research is telling us that extinction rates today are at least 1,000 times higher than normal. That’s alarming. Some are calling it a sixth mass extinction.

There are many reasons for these dangerous extinction trends, and chief among them is the loss of habitat.

With this in mind--we’re losing species at alarming rates and we’re not sufficiently protecting their habitat--we should be doubling up our conservation efforts. And yet despite this imperative, the Trump administration has proposed new rules to weaken the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. law aimed at preventing extinction and helping species recover.

The gist of the Trump administration rollback is this: protections for threatened species (one step better than endangered) will be weakened, critical habitat will be harder to protect, and economic impacts will now play a role in whether we should trouble ourselves with saving a species.

But opposition from within Congress, while important, isn’t enough. As I write this, there’s an open public comment period. In other words, we the American people have an opportunity to tell the administration what we think and how we feel about their plan.